Kincaid's Battery eBook

They, of course, had not built it. The late Judge
had acquired it from the descendants of a planter
of indigo and coffee who in the oldest Creole days
had here made his home and lived his life as thoroughly
in the ancient baronial spirit as if the Mississippi
had been the mediaeval Rhine. Only its perfect
repair was the Judge’s touch, a touch so modestly
true as to give it a charm of age and story which the
youth and beauty of the Callender ladies only enhanced,
enhancing it the more through their lack of a male
protector—­because of which they were always
going to move into town, but never moved.

Here, some nine or ten days after Greenleaf’s
flight, Hilary Kincaid, in uniform at last, was one
of two evening visitors, the other being Mandeville.
In the meantime our lover of nonsense had received
a “hard jolt.” So he admitted in
a letter to his friend, boasting, however, that it
was unattended by any “internal injury.”
In the circuit of a single week, happening to be thrown
daily and busily into “her” society, “the
harpoon had struck.”

He chose the phrase as an honest yet delicate reminder
of the compact made when last the two chums had ridden
together.

All three of the Callenders were in the evening group,
and the five talked about an illumination of the city,
set for the following night. In the business
centre the front of every building was already being
hung with fittings from sidewalk to cornice. So
was to be celebrated the glorious fact (Constance
and Mandeville’s adjective) that in the previous
month Louisiana had seized all the forts and lighthouses
in her borders and withdrawn from the federal union
by a solemn ordinance signed in tears. This great
lighting up, said Hilary, was to be the smile of fortitude
after the tears. Over the city hall now floated
daily the new flag of the state, with the colors of
its stripes—­

“Reverted to those of old Spain,” murmured
Anna, mainly to herself yet somewhat to Hilary.
Judge Callender had died a Whig, and politics interested
the merest girls those days.

Even at the piano, where Anna played and Hilary hovered,
in pauses between this of Mozart and that of Mendelssohn,
there was much for her to ask and him to tell about;
for instance, the new “Confederate States,”
a bare fortnight old! Would Virginia come into
them? Eventually, yes.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” cried Constance,
overhearing. (Whatever did not begin with oh, those
times, began with ah.)

“And must war follow?” The question
was Anna’s again, and Hilary sat down closer
to answer confidentially:

“Yes, the war was already a fact.”

“And might not the Abolitionists send their
ships and soldiers against New Orleans?”

“Yes, the case was supposable.”

“And might not Jackson’s battlefield of
1815, in close view from these windows, become a new
one?”